Friday, 28 December 2007

Following the well-deserved sinking of Blogsource, where the original Sour Grapes blog was for a year from April 2006 to April 2007, the whole kit and caboodle was imported into LiveDigital, where it has languished without update since.

In the mail today comes news that LiveDigital is also going down the toilet. Probably just as well. They were only ever a file-hosting site that tried to dip a toe in the blogging water, but they hadn't a hope. I think when Blogsource went down the pan most people wisely fled to the uplands of Blogger and WordPress.

So long and short, that year of Sour Grapes is doomed. David Rochester's Blogsource blog will also be gone, and who knows what else. Oh well, easy come, easy go. The hammer comes down on January 7. It's still open until then (link in sidebar). If you see anything you like, you're free to carry it off.

Sunday, 23 December 2007

I never quite got why people are so obsessed with this. If you like to eat chocolate, it probably won’t kill you if you don’t overindulge. Isn’t the most important thing that you get variation into your menu?

tregenza said,

December 23, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Maarten said: “Isn’t the most important thing that you get variation into your menu?”

Definitely - so make sure you eat a good balance of milk, white and dark chocolate.

It's the Nearly Me Gaff, priced at only $29.00. Fine, Grapesy, I hear you say, but what's a Nearly Me Gaff and what does it do? Here's a clearer picture:(don't for the love of God click to largify)

Here's what Amazon.com has to say about it:

Product DescriptionFor the guy that's just too big! Introducing the Nearly Me Gaff - the perfect solution for men who wish to be "tucked" in and out of sight! Nearly Me gaff provides firm control up front where you need it. Nearly Me gaff with low thong style back for a sleek invisible look.

What can it all mean? What is Amazon trying to insinuate? Here's a FAQ on the whole question of gaffs, which incidentally you probably don't want to take with you when you go fishing with your buddies.

Make your own excellent Christmas album with this selection of free MP3s from the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, who have featured here before. And here, on the old Sour Grapes blog now closed down and moved like the Queen Mary to LiveDigital. And I wondered why I kept it. Now we know.

Saturday, 22 December 2007

Yes, I know there have been quite a few vids lately, that's because I've been playing with Windows Live Writer.

This one is from 1984, and has become iconic. The most striking thing about it now, however, is the way it's become like an Oscars-show In Memoriam reel. These were considered the top music stars of the time, and how many of them can you even name?

Look who's featured: Paul Young, Boy George, Simon Le Bon, Tony Hadley, Paul Weller, that Kemp boy who wasn't in EastEnders, the late Paula Yates, the bloke from ABC whose name I never knew in the first place, someone from Heaven 17, the Bananaramas. All of them either really dead (Paula) or virtually. Marilyn was never anybody even then, but slipped in somehow. There are a couple of black faces, fuck knows who they are, I didn't realise we had black people in pop in Britain in the Eighties.

The only ones still at the top are Sting O Ye Luthe and Bonobo out of U2. George Michael is famous for other things these days, like appearing in the Extras Christmas Special, now available on MyTube. Phil Collins is probably still around, somewhere. Who cares?

ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa's apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".

"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.

By 7pm a small crowd has gathered in front of a small door under London Bridge station. Some are dressed formally, some less so; most of them stand in little knots of affiliation. At 7.15 we are ushered through the door and into a coat-check area, and then into a pretend lift that rattles for a few seconds and ejects us into a crowded Victorian street that runs impressively along a tunnel under the railroad tracks. There is a dark pub, an old curiosity shop and a lot of Dickens characters. I have unknowingly stepped into a world where one of my deepest phobias - a fear of interacting with actors dressed in period costume - is the main entertainment.

I am immediately approached by a young girl in a dirty bonnet with very crooked stage teeth. As she begins to engage me in cockney conversation, I can feel sweat running into my collar. I know she will not break character, even if I beg her to point out the nearest fire exits. She spots my notepad and tells me to write down her story. "Once upon a time there was a nice girl called Maude," she says, "who wanted a boyfriend but something got in her way. However, she had the biggest heart of all ..." As I write I think, Oh my God, she's coming on to me. What do I do? Eventually I give her the slip, only to be confronted by Miss Havisham, who tells me her whole sad tale. I can't think of anything to say, apart from: "Yes, I know."

Friday, 21 December 2007

Thursday, 20 December 2007

Another list, this time an extract from the full index of photographs by Charles W Cushman, over 14,500 of which he donated to his university. Indices like this read like glimpses into some secret world. They always leave me longing for more.

A list of suggested topics to browse through, as an introduction to the letters of Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle. It does seem to cover quite a bit of ground. And there's more besides.

This solo version by Christy Moore doesn't have the drama of the Pogues' version with Kirsty McColl, but it is at least true to the song's own narrative. The song within the song is sung, if you listen, by an old man in the drunk tank. It's not a duet.

I like the line, "Ye're an ould hoor on junk" rather than "ould slut" because it's more Irish to my ear. There was no fuss in 1996 about the "cheap lousy faggot" line. See here for story, and despair.

Warning: The combination of words, music and images contained in this video presentation could cause diabetes. This is about as kitsch as it's possible to get. Check out the half-dressed midget Santa chick (WTF?) and the stairway to heaven, clearly a reference to the recent Led Zep reunion, man.

Gilbert, of course, knew exactly how to craft a lyric so it would rot your molars out in situ. But what does he mean about hoping "the peace you seek may then resume"? Does Christmas chez Gilbert involve the breakdown of peace? Well, he is Irish.

A Happy Christmas to all my readers, as Billy Whizz used to say. If you're not a Christmas type, take whatever Happy Holiday you prefer.

Monday, 17 December 2007

Wow. Really that's all you need to say about Pizza Hut's "Double Roll" pizza - hot dog stuffed crust pizza with corn, mini- hamburger patties and a whole lot more. I really don't have much else to say except for that a medium costs ¥2500 ($20.50) and a large will set you back ¥3550 ($29). Oh and like most amazing things, it's only available in Japan.

This is a pizza whose crust is stuffed with hot-dogs, and whose toppings include hamburgers. All right, mini-hamburgers, but dozens of them. Who else but an American company could come up with such a thing? How long before it's sold there, and the population is decimated?

You're probably going to find over this coming holiday season that there are not nearly enough Top 10 lists looking back at 2007, so I thought you'd be happy to find 50 of them featured in Time (link below).

One of the lists is magazine covers, the winner of which is this awesome pic, stolen of course from National Lampoon, but that's no bad thing.

This week I have been totally loving Buzzword, a Flash-based online word processor.

Yes, I know, it sounds quite mad. I'm not at all convinced it's of any use whatsoever. I'm not yet sold on the idea of online docs at all, though Google Docs is handy for me as I don't have Excel installed and some people can't make a simple list without turning it into a spreadsheet. I know there's a cognitive hiccup: I know that keeping all my email online with GMail is madder than putting up some Word .docs I'll never look at again.

But Buzzword is so sensuous. It's owned by Adobe, so it has beautiful fonts, but mainly there's a certain sort of unctuous feel about typing in Flash. Something very physical, which is probably (I know, I know) just a hair's-breadth away from the nasty sticky typing experience you sometimes get on slow websites. But that's where sensuality resides, isn't it, on that hair's breadth? Ice-cream is only a millimetre from cold milk on one side and stony ice on the other. Sexual arousal is virtually indistinguishable from cardiac distress.

All right dear, calm down, it's only a word-processor. I must build more real pleasure into my life. Man was never meant to get excited about this sort of thing.

Sunday, 16 December 2007

I'm writing this post on Windows Live Writer, and I never thought I would say such a thing, but it rocks the casbah for blogging to more than one blog. Yes, that's right, Windows rawks!

I've been using ScribeFire, which is a Firefox add-on which basically does the same thing: it allows you to highlight text you come across on the web and blog it direct to your blog without opening up the site and doing all that Create New Post shizzle.

Where it really performs is if you happen to operate more than one blog at a time, especially if they involve different blog identities. You feed them all into ScribeFire at the set-up, and it remembers who you are, logs in and out for you, posts and so on.

But ScribeFire is a bit limited, has a nasty little itty-bitty composing screen and I can't remember how to get to the settings to fiddle with some of the details, like the way it takes too many line-breaks and then signs itself off.

Then along came Windows Live Writer, which does all of that and more. Unlike ScribeFire it downloads your blog style (for each blog) and presents you with a composing screen that's not only big enough to read, but also resembles the blog you're posting to. It allows the insertion of pix and tables (for those who like that sort of thing), and has all the usual formatting gizmi like blockquotes etc.

But where it really rawks is with its plug-ins, which won't ever I suppose be as multivarious as the Fox's, but which are pretty cool all the same. Here are three that attracted me, though I haven't used them all:

Insert Polaroid: you may have spotted that feature on this blog or over on May Contain Nuts, which has been on fire since I discovered this baby. All your pix are mounted to look like Polaroids, with tilt, captions and evahthang.

Here, look, don't I look like the King of Hearts:

Insert video: never mind copying and pasting the embed code, or wondering where it is for sites that are not the Tube of You. When you're on the page where the video is at, click on Insert Video and WLW will fish out the code for you and slip that baby right in there.

Insert Now Playing on iTunes plug-in: Yeah I know nobody gives a shit, but still.

While writing this, I was listening to "The Other Side of Summer" by Elvis Costello

You can find out all about it here, and download it if you want to try it.

Come join the slowest-growing religion in the world - Dudeism. An ancient philosophy that preaches non-preachiness, practices as little as possible, and above all, uh...lost my train of thought there. Anyway, if you'd like to find peace on earth and goodwill, man, we'll help you get started. Right after a little nap.

Wednesday, 12 December 2007

Some British tourists are complaining that they lost half a day's shopping because their coach driver took them to Lille in Belgium instead of Lille in France thanks to a bum choice on his SatNav.

The shoppers, from Gloucestershire, England, were forced to spend an extra four hours in the bus as the driver corrected his mistake and had only two hours left for shopping by the time they arrived at their destination in France, The Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

Some of the passengers were demanding the return of their $300-per person payments for the bus trip.

I'm wondering what else went wrong. Here's a map of the two Lilles. As you can see, they're about 87 miles or 140 km apart. How does that translate into a four-hour detour? Zoom in a little and you'll see that Lille, Belgium is close to the E313, which then joins the E19 direction Brussels. Run round the Western Ring and then hop onto the E429 and you have motorway almost all the way. Even at a speed of 90 km/h you could be in Lille, France in 90minutes. Driving directions from Google put the distance at 160 km, and driving time at 1h36. Still, a long way from four hours.

So what else happened on that ill-starred trip? I think we should be told, but I don't suppose we'll ever know.

Today my Google Reader started reading itself. As I watched, it ran through all of my subscriptions, removing two or three (or perhaps more) from the unread list, as if it were purging old articles. I've no idea how many were rubbed out. I was too taken aback to count.

So now Google Reader fetches the news for you, and reads it too, then deletes it. Pretty soon the information and Google will have a closed relationship, just the two of them, and the rest of us can go hang. Google will know stuff on our behalf. Maybe they can tie up with CyberTwins and you can send an avatar off to debate the existence of God with someone else's avatar, both of you supported in your arguments by the Web resources Google now knows you would find most useful.

And we can sit around all day like Elohim. Completely useless at last.

You wrote a column in the New York Press a few years back referring to journalism as “shoveling coal for Satan.” I believe you also said that journalism as a career was worse than being a worker in a tampon factory. Should any sane young person consider a career in journalism?

If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.

ETA: Here's a clip from the column mentioned at the top of the post, also worth reading:

I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.

Sunday, 9 December 2007

When I was living in Paris in 1973, I used to visit a cafe on the Boulevard Montparnasse every second Monday and get plastered while doing my laundry next door. There were only four good songs on the jukebox: two by Michel Polnareff, two by Slade. The very fact that Slade had major hits in France without any corresponding success in America demonstrates that there is still hope for the French. Well, there was. Every second Monday, I would visit the café and order a half-dozen beers and listen to Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Cum on Feel the Noize over and over again until the bartender begged me to stop. One day I turned up and the jukebox had been disconnected.

When the headline reads, "Man charged with putting nude photos of teens on Internet" there is virtually no chance of the story containing any such photos, no matter how hard you click. So you might as well just not bother.

ETA: I should perhaps point out that this is one of a series of clips in support of the WGA strike, which you can search for on Tyoube as "speechless" or just click on the related items you'll get when you watch this one.

So my headline was ironificational. No offence, writer dudes.

Thursday, 6 December 2007

In shocking news tonight, we can reveal that k.d. lang, in her version of the Joni Mitchell song A Case of You on the album Hymns of the 49th Parallel, sings "I rememember the time you told me" instead of "I remember the time" etc. [Emphasis added]

Grapes 2.0 is sure of its case, which is based on detailed analysis of the piece of music in question. At first it was no more than a vague notion, but after running the recording through my WavePad software, stripping out as much of the background noise as possible and slowing the extract down slightly, we produced this damning evidence.

We now dare to stand up and bring this serious allegation to the public. The time for cover-ups, Ms Lang, is long over. It's time your fans were given the explanation they deserve, and we here at Grapes 2.0 call upon you to use these columns pages to do just that -- before it is too late.

This is stuff you look at and think, how is this even possible? Not just, How do they do it, but What is the trick, why can I not see the trick they're playing?

At the same time, the very idea of manipulating material at that almost subliminal level -- look and see how tiny strips of paper have to be turned to 3D shapes -- fills me with the sort of quantum dread I wrote about, inadequately, in this post. In some way, the idea of descending to that level of detail provokes in me the sensation of tumbling into the abyss. I think it's why I was never a very accomplished drug-taker. I don't think my consciousness takes kindly to being heightened.

Monday, 3 December 2007

Hey check out this new blog I discovered it's really great you should go there and read it and stuff. I know this guy who thought he could do that too and he asked them and they let him just like that that's right you could too. Just drop me them a banknote message at this address and I'll they'll give it some considerification and stuff.

Sunday, 2 December 2007

A rightwing Dutch MP said Wednesday that he was making a film to highlight what he calls ‘fascist’ passages in the Qur'an, in his latest high-profile criticism of Islam. The interior and justice ministers expressed concern but said they had no authority to stop Geert Wilders screening his film.

The ludicrous Wilders has had a Theo Van Gogh complex ever since the film-maker provocateur was murdered in the street in Amsterdam in November 2004. I firmly believe he thinks Van Gogh stole his anti-Islamic thunder with his film Submission (with Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and then made matters worse by getting himself all that media attention with his murder.

Maybe someone thinks I'm being harsh. If so, just take a look at Wilders' photo and then tell me he's not a nutter.

Sold-out concert, comfortable profit, excellent reception incl. SO and encore -- Hallelujah Chorus -- that saw them stay on their feet. Yours truly came away with major kudos for bringing so many peeps in. My fellow singers did a great job, and I can now officially relax until January 3, when the new season begins for real.

And I sang the whole thing without a score, from memory. I don't (much) like to boast, but I was totally rawkin tonight.